Conventionally, there has been known a massaging apparatus that receives an external input such as the sound of a musical instrument or sound effect and converts the input into mechanical vibration of a vibrating element, thereby producing a massage effect. This type of massaging apparatus includes a chair equipped with a vibration device disclosed in Japanese Utility Model Application Publication No. Hei. 2-96133. This publication does not clearly show a configuration of a vibrating element or mechanism of vibration, but a frequency band of not higher than about 100 Hz of a music source such as an external musical instrument or sound effect is caused to pass through a low pass filter and is electrically amplified, thereby turning on and off vibration of the vibrating element by a rhythm of the music source. This massaging apparatus is intended to avoid a negative effect such as vibration or the like associated with an input signal mainly composed of a voice by utilizing the source with a low frequency band.
However, when a music source with only a frequency band of not higher than about 100 Hz is used as the vibration source, audio within medium and high frequency bands is not used, so that the massaging operation might repeat simple rhythms. For example, with music that repeats a bass line (low-frequency band), various sounds within medium and high frequency bands such as sound from a piano, a cymbal, etc., are not used, and the resulting massaging becomes continuous and simple. As should be appreciated, the massage effect is produced by the vibrating element, but a user to be massaged does not expect relaxation effects produced by the music source.
Further, the following important problems arise. The audio signal is composed of a set of waves of substantially U-shape or inverted U-shape which has a width almost equal to half of a cycle. Therefore, if the audio signal in the low frequency band is directly amplified up to a usable voltage range of a motor and given to the motor, the resulting output becomes much smaller than that in the case where the motor is continuously driven (without the use of the audio signal).
When the massaging operation is a vibration operation and the music signal that has passed through the low pass filter is used as the control signal as in the above conventional example, the tempo of music or rise and fall of the music might be reflected in the massaging operation naturally to some degree because the control signal is extracted from the music signal. However, the tempo of music or rise and fall of the music are not always reflected in the massaging operations such as kneading or tapping, because frequencies of such massaging operations are lower than that of the vibration operation. When the tempo of music or rise and fall of the music are not reflected in the massaging operation, this is not comfortable to the user.
When an attempt is made to reflect the tempo of music in the massaging operation, it should be considered that there is a response delay with respect to the control signal due to inertia or the like in the drive system of the massaging mechanism including a motor.
Meanwhile, when sequence control is performed without the use of music, an expertise for programming is required to create a massaging program. Besides, since a content of program is difficult to know by intuition, it takes time to create the program, errors tend to occur, and the like.